Do free school meals work?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
All pupils at infant schools in England are to get free school lunches from next September, but does the evidence prove free dinners improve results? 'I accept every time I get in my car, there's a 20% chance I could die' - it's a line from the Formula 1 hit film, Rush, but was it really true for 1970s racing drivers? The government wants shops to start charging for plastic bags and the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg says a plastic bag takes 1,000 years to degrade, but More or Less finds the environmental facts about plastic bags are much less certain than that statistic suggests. And do the health benefits of cycling outweigh the risk of injury? Professor David Spiegelhalter goes through the numbers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading more or less from the BBC. |
| 0:03.2 | This is the version of the programme first broadcast on BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:07.3 | Here's Tim Halford. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello and welcome to more or less the programme which takes the Grand Prix for statistical good sense. |
| 0:15.3 | This week bikes and very fast cars. |
| 0:24.2 | But first, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg proudly announced this week |
| 0:28.9 | that free school meals will be provided in England to all children in the first three years of school. |
| 0:34.8 | At the moment fewer than one in five children are eligible and registered to get those meals |
| 0:39.4 | generally because their families were receiving benefit payments for being out of work. |
| 0:43.6 | This follows a recent pilot conducted in Newham and Durham between 2009 and 2011 |
| 0:49.6 | which seemed to show that giving free food to primary school children was good for their academic |
| 0:54.2 | performance. Meanwhile a parallel pilot in Wolverhampton which expanded the free school meals |
| 0:59.7 | programme merely to a broader subset of pupils seem to show no impact. |
| 1:04.8 | Ellen Grieves, a researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, |
| 1:08.1 | was one of the people responsible for evaluating these pilot results. |
| 1:12.1 | We're able to tell that the type of food that children ate at lunchtime changed, |
| 1:16.0 | with as you'd expect less food associated with packed lunches being eaten, less crisps, |
| 1:21.2 | actually less whole pieces of fruit and more food associated with hot lunches. |
| 1:26.0 | We're not able to tell whether behaviour improved but we know that parents' reports of behaviour |
| 1:31.3 | didn't change significantly. And do we know whether the children were just eating |
| 1:35.5 | crisps and maybe fruit at home? Were they substituting? |
| 1:38.8 | There was some degree of substitution so overall levels of consumption didn't change dramatically. |
... |
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